PicoBlog

Review originally published on Instagram on December 23, 2020.

Here’s a link to purchase Annihilation.

Quick summary: Four unnamed scientists enter Area X, a long abandoned bit of coastline in the southeast of the US. They know little about Area X except that it is uninhabited, the other 12 expeditions ended in violence, and that they will be hypnotized to cross the border. Our narrator is a biologist. Stuff immediately gets weird—first in the form of tunnel covered in biblical-sounding verses written on the walls in moss.

This isn’t a book with answers. Characters are frequently consumed by strong, inexplicable desires that seem to be created by the land. The narrator inhales a spore that leaves her immune to hypnosis... or maybe prone to hallucination? And most confusingly, they characters don’t trust one another, though it’s hard to tell if this is something caused by Area X, or if they are naturally suspicious people.

As you can probably tell, setting supersedes character (maybe even plot) in this novel. That felt right. If anything, I wanted more. I wanted more cypress trees, more spanish moss, more reeds and sinking mud. It’s the perfect setting for an unsettling story like this—something does feel “timeless” (in the “removed from time” or “outside of time” sense) about the marshes on the Gulf Coast. I grew up in New Orleans, a city built on a swamp, a city that feels like it’s in a constant state of decay, a city where you palpably feel nature creeping up on you on a daily basis—in big ways, like the threat of hurricanes, and in small ways, like watching oak trees break through the sidewalk. In New Orleans, and in the book, nature seems like it might take over, but there’s nothing hostile or threatening about it. The threat comes from other people, and efforts to tame or control natural processes. That isn’t to say that this book is a meditation on climate change or whatever. More that it has a fundamental respect for ecology.

I think what I like best about Annihilation is the “magical realism” of it all—the mundane (washing the dishes, an empty lot of grass, sleeping with a stranger) becomes horrific, and the horror (finding disfigured corpses, being inhabited by a supernatural creature) becomes strangely beautiful. It really is the mundane that will linger with me. The narrator’s husband mysteriously comes home, changed but unhurt, after 18 months away and they eat spaghetti. He looks at his boat. They read on the porch. And then he’s gone again.

A confession: I saw the movie first! So my reading was a little colored by the expectations set up by the film. The book world is much more muted—things are uncanny in slight ways (with one major exception) rather than straightforwardly supernatural.

I was struck by how much longer it takes the reader to find out what is “going on” in Area X in the book that in the film. Which makes sense: it’s easier to have patience for a scifi novel from FSG that you expect is gonna be literary and weird, than it is to have patience for a blockbuster scifi starring Natalie Portman.

But there’s also something to say (beyond the FSG tag) about uncertainty in film v books. Just the fact that it takes much more time to read a book than it does to watch a movie, that the reader has to dedicate more energy (though my film friends may disagree! But to me, film watching is passive rather than active (images are given to you on the screen vs constructing images from a text)), I think this allows the reader to be more comfortable in uncertainty than a films audience would be. While both mediums might demand a lot from the consumer, by way of reading’s activeness, the reader has already implicitly signed on for the labor—they’ve agreed to patience and to “figuring out” what’s going on in a text. Idk I’m not trying to be a snob, and I can think of a lot of great films that do wield uncertainty well (hi David Lynch). I’m saying that literature is the better medium for uncertainty. Giovanna feel free to take me to task if you disagree!!!

There’s a lot else to say—about mirroring and mimicking, about ghost birds and reading other people’s journals, about marriage. But I don’t want to spoil too much. Bizzy this is the next one on your list!!!

Finally, I’m sorry, but a book about an expedition into the wilderness where the team can only bring along maps, and a map isn’t included for the reader? What the fuckkkkkk... not cool!

ncG1vNJzZmian6S4r7vTnqqbpJ%2Bce7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZpqmnp61qrjAraCopl2Xxm62xJ%2BdZq6Ro7GmvsyenKs%3D